I do not expect the Catholic church under pope Francis to change any of the major doctrines of the church such as on contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and celibacy. However, given his expressions of wanting to create a kinder, gentler image for the church, I did expect him to back off on some of the non-doctrinal harsh measures that his predecessors had taken.
[Read more…]
The situation in Ukraine goes from bad to worse with increasing numbers of deaths, with the latest consisting of the authorities in Kiev killing pro-Russian separatists. Today comes reports that there have been dozens of further deaths in addition to the dozens killed over the weekend, though the details are still sketchy.
[Read more…]
The US Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the prayer practices of the town of Greece were constitutional. The court voted 5-4 with the usual alignment of Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas in the majority, with Kennedy writing the majority opinion. You can see all the opinions here and Lyle Denniston has some analysis of it.
[Read more…]
This is the sequel to the 2004 film Anchorman and has the same cast headed by Will Farrell. I enjoy most of Farrell’s films. There is something appealing about the eternally clueless, vain, insecure, and socially inept doofus persona that he adopts.
[Read more…]
Modern scholarly techniques are used to detect which ancient documents are genuine and which are forgeries. In 2012 there reports of the discovery of a piece of papyrus that seemed to suggest that Jesus had been married. The document had been given by an anonymous person to a Harvard scholar who proclaimed it to be genuine. Needless to say, this caused a huge fuss and scholars pored over it and the weight of their opinions went from genuine to forgery, back to genuine, and now back to forgery again.
[Read more…]
When boarding airplanes, different airlines have different policies. The most common policy adopted by airlines is to board passengers by seat rows starting from the back. This makes a kind of intuitive sense. A few airlines have some kind of zone system. About three years ago, a physicist studied the issue using Monte Carlo simulations came up with a plan that can cut boarding times by half.
[Read more…]
The study of the origins of altruism is quite fascinating. There is increasing evidence that our cooperative, helpful, and altruistic behaviors have an innate component that we add to by acculturation. Felix Warneken has done some experiments on the origins of altruism and helpfulness and the results are quite remarkable.
[Read more…]
Those who advocate shredding people’s constitutional protections and using barbaric methods like torture in order to ‘protect us’ and ‘keep us safe’ have the easy side of the argument because they are appealing to emotions like fear. Those of us who argue that living with some risk is the necessary consequence of living in a free society are appealing to the rational part of the brain and that is a harder sell.
[Read more…]
Playing a character in a scripted play or film or TV show is what actors routinely do. So when Stephen Colbert dons his TV character for his show, he is just acting. But the really tricky part is being in character while doing interviews because then much of it cannot be scripted in advance and you have to genuinely inhabit that character so that the exchanges seem genuine.
[Read more…]
I am in the market for some patio furniture and looked up what was available online. Of course, in the days following that I saw ads for patio furniture popping up all over the place. This tracking of one’s online browsing and using that data to target marketing at you started out being something to be amazed by, then it turned to seeming creepy, and now it seems so routine that we scarcely even give it a thought.
[Read more…]